Tom Sawyer author Mark Twain birthday celebrated with Google Doodle

Last week Google had an intricate Doodle on their home page that was quite possibly the most interactive one so far, which marked the 60th anniversary of Stanislaw Lem. Today the search engine giant has Tom Sawyer author Mart Twains birthday that is celebrated with a Google Doodle.

If you go to the Google Home page you are met with a Doodle from the story where Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into painting a fence. The American author was most famous for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from 1876. Then came its sequel in 1885 the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was often called the Great American Novel.

Mark Twain was the author’s pen name with his real name being Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was born on this day in 1835. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri that went on to provide the setting for his novels. He began work as a printer and also worked as a typesetter and helped his older brother with his newspaper.

Twain then went on to become a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before turning to gold mining. This didn’t work out so he then turned his hand to journalism and wrote The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. He made a lot of money from his writings but bad investments saw him lose a lot as well.

He was born during a visit by Halley’s Comet and famously predicted he would “go out with it”, and died on April 21st 1910 one day after Halley’s Comet passed close to earth. To find out more about Mark Twain’s life and work head over to Wikipedia.